I am working on several concurrent research projects in Island Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Timor Leste and the Philippines). These include work on developing new models and gathering new data to explain the appearance of agriculture and pottery use in Island SE Asia. This work has focused on open sites in eastern Indonesia and more recently north Palawan in the Philippines. Related projects involve developing models for possible causal linkages between climate change, warfare and defensive settlement patterning, focused on Timor Leste and eastern Indonesia, within a context of the broader western tropical Pacific region. Finally, I maintain an interest in the late precolonial period in Island Southeast Asia (the subject of my dissertation), particularly links between Islam, trade and settlement in the 10th-16th centuries AD. All of these project incorporate field and analysis opportunities for students, especially from SE Asian institutions, as well as public archaeology and museum components.

Discipline:

Archaeology

Keywords:

<p>Tropical island land use and agriculture, paleoclimates, warfare, archaeology and history, religious change; Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific; joint appointment with the Burke Museum as Curator of Archaeology</p>

Selected Publications

<p>Field, Julie and Peter V. Lape. Paleoclimates and the emergence of fortifications in the tropical Pacific islands. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 29:113&ndash;124.</p>

<p>Lape, Peter V. and Chao Ching-yung. 2008. Fortification as a human response to late Holocene climate change in East Timor. Archaeology in Oceania 43:11-21</p>